I don’t disagree, but these schools are happily recruiting affluent URMs also.
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Probably need to find some paying customers too ?
Good writing and literate? No. I beg to disagree compared to 20 years ago. Who needs to write with ChatGpt? And they certainly don’t read books for pleasure. They communicate social media style in short and precise style.
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Yes, but for most students, they will not be social media specialists after graduation, so they will need adult skills for the workplace. Reading comprehension and fundamental writing and quant skills are always important.
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Social media style is often short, but is not necessarily precise and is often lacking in detail. Sometimes, the lack of detail is intended to mislead.
Of course, the reading comprehension questions on the SAT use passages longer than 140 or 280 characters, but they are nowhere near the length of news, opinion, or academic articles or books.
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Unfortunately, in the new DSAT all they have is paragraphs. Gone are the passages with multiple questions. Yet another case of dumbing things down instead of addressing the actual issue IMO.
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You are, of course, absolutely right that there could be any number of causes.
But if a school like Caltech is failing to yield 250 students that absolutely rock their professors’ socks off from a graduating class of three and a half million, I think its faculty could be understood for being upset with the admissions department, whatever the underlying causes of the failure are.
I got considerable pushback a couple weeks ago in the other thread when I wrote:
Interestingly, no one actually objected my premise (which is pretty much self-evident at this point), insisting instead that it is academic institutions’ institutional right to pursue their other institutional priorities, whatever they might be.
One can simultaneously recognize that the institutions can, of course, choose their own priorities and craft their own policies, and that they shouldn’t then act all surprised that when the policies they craft prioritize other things over classroom rigor, the fall in admitted students’ ability to tolerate said rigor naturally follows.
Each individual faculty member might not actually have any evidence as such. They just see what they see in their classes.
But when half of Caltech faculty is shaking their heads in their collective cry for help, there’s gotta be some fire behind all that smoke.
Petey, I am asking this very respectfully, because I honestly think MIT admissions does it better than anyone (until recently I gave that distinction to Caltech;), but like you said, it’s your choice to post here;), so here it is:
Are you, really?
Is faculty really adcoms’ main stakeholder? Does their opinion outweigh that of the administration?
Because I honestly can’t imagine a math or physics professor saying “get me some more of those lacrosse players in my class” (to name just one of the purported institutional priorities).
I am sure every one of us here acknowledges that you and your colleagues at other institutions act under a very complex set of constraints.
But the very nature of the multifactor optimization is such that you are unlikely to optimize any one variable.
So the question then becomes: how much classroom rigor is a given institution willing to sacrifice in order to do better on some other metrics.
Evidently, half of Caltech’s faculty are now thinking: too much.
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For us, I don’t think the distinction is as clear as you might think. As the Selingo article says, we are embedded in administration (which you can think of as the executive branch), but also report up through CUAFA, a faculty advisory committee (which you can think of as a congressional oversight branch). And if you look back in history — President’s Reports, old issues of the Tech — the thing that tends to get stuff in admissions changed is the faculty pressuring the administration to do stuff on their terms.
I do think we are more responsive to our faculty than many other admissions offices (I say this because when I go to elite math camp conferences, I’ll run into professors who say “how do I get my admissions office to listen to me about how to find good math kids,” and I’ll shrug and say "idk, it’s sort of unimaginable that we wouldn’t be responsive to faculty).
However, faculty are not a monolith, so I think the faculty are a multifactor optimization within themselves. There are faculty who think we should only pay attention to test scores and advanced coursework, and faculty who think we should be prioritizing socioeconomic diversity and educating from a diverse base, and faculty who think (yes) that sports is good because it trains business leaders, or whatever (and in fact, student athletes at MIT have a higher MIT GPA on average than non-athletes, so you could argue they’re academic overperformers!).
That’s why it’s genuinely hard for me to read everything into the Caltech report that you are reading into it. For example, it’s possible that some of those 140 faculty think there is some degradation in academic performance (and then a subsequent empirical question about whether they are right or wrong about that). It’s also possible some of them think that there hasn’t been a degradation in performance, but they’ve read the research that we/Dartmouth/Yale/UC released and think tests should be brought back to increase socioeconomic diversity holding academic performance constant. Those two groups could be aligned toward the same goal from quite different priors about what the problem was.
So I would say yes, our overriding ground truth touchstone is “do the faculty think the students are good + can we demonstrate empirically they are good,” because if you don’t have that, you lose legitimacy within the institution. Or at least I think we would. But before SFFA, we were able to improve academic outcomes and diversity at the same time (using testing as a key tactic). So that wasn’t a sacrifice. They actually fed back into each other (because our research showed that as we diversified across racial/gender lines, our yield improved across the board, including with the very top academic performers — the people who win big competitions and such — who has historically turned down MIT because they thought it was too monolithic, but preferred it once it became diversified, socioeconomically but also in “types of people” more broadly defined, including athletics and whatever).
I appreciate your respect question asking, and my respectful response would be: I suspect you and I are aligned on thinking that MIT should be a place where the most capable students in the world can get an education that will accelerate them the fastest and allow them to impact the world the most. Where we might diverge (don’t want to put words in your mouth) is that I think the intentional construction of socioeconomic/demographic (and other areas of life) diversity of MIT — above a common high baseline level of non-negotiable academic excellence — helps with that task, rather than hindering it or being at a fundamental tradeoff. Obviously, with the SFFA decision, a key tool for doing that has been taken away from us, so we’ll see what happens next.
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This.
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Appreciate your thoughtful and detailed response, Petey!
I considered acknowledging this as I was writing my missive, but decided against it for brevity, and because it might be less of a factor at some schools than others:) You are absolutely right to bring it up, though.
This impact on yield among the top students aspect is very interesting to hear, and is something I’ve been wondering about, actually.
Keep that up! 
…And while I have your ear, I’d like, if I may, to compliment you on your timeless classic “Applying Sideways” essay (not that you need to hear it from another anonymous parent on the internet).
I’ve only come across it after our older was adMITted, but recognized it immediately as the approach we have been practicing all along with our kids. In the end, one can not control the admissions outcomes, but if they do not do anything just for the sake of college admissions, they will have no regrets either way.
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CC is not a debate forum, as we are regularly reminded, so the fact that your beliefs are not constantly refuted/disagreed with doesn’t not constitute general acceptance of your premise.
Several people disagreed (and continue to disagree) about whether your criteria produces “optimal classroom rigor”. That’s not something to be objectively measured without a lot of variables being identified and agreed upon - which has not happened to the best of my knowledge.
What I have seen said by many of the people who’ve disagreed with your premise and belief is that there are many roads to Rome. Families should seek out the schools that provide the path they think is optimal.
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That can run both ways, as UMC students know full well that FGLI students are admitted on average with lower stats. Thus some may feel the way you describe, others may feel the opposite and think they are smarter and more prepared.
That’s news for my kid and her friends, both in high school and at college. If you also look at the sheer number of social media posts by millennials and Gen-Zs that are about reading books, you’d realize that they read books just like the older generation. They also get the same crap from their peers and parents about “your nose is always in a book”
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D23 just received a book she had pre-ordered and is in a bit of agony…wanting to start reading this next book of a series she loves but knowing she has so much reading this semester at school (once she starts a book, she can’t stop reading until its done). She now has a countdown on her phone for spring break when she can start the new book guilt free.
I had three kids who all are book lovers - but then, both DH and I read voraciously as well.
I have one like that. I think reading for pleasure is the number one think my D misses (not that she had time in HS) so she tries hard to make up for it on breaks. She is the type that will leave clothes behind to fit more books in the suitcase, then throws in the kindle as an emergency just in case.
Do you feel this is still a common perception among MIT’s target audience? I ask because MIT was the US school that I and my D22’s HS counselor thought would be the best fit for her but she refused to apply because of the above and probably also because she thought it was a place only for “people who win big competitions” and she’s not one of those (i.e., she felt a bit intimidated).
FWIW, I feel that students such as YouTuber Nina Wang and her friends have helped to “normalize” the perception of MIT.
That was me, back in the day. Granted, “smarts” is much cooler these days.
I couldn’t agree more. Similarly, CB decided which types of buyers had access to those types of searches. Groups that fueled the SAT had greater access and manipulation of the data and lists.
Can I ask how she compared it to Oxford? That’s a place where I’d expect there to be both socially and intellectually intimidating people. But maybe Oxford is just a more familiar setting for someone who grew up in the U.K.?
That’s an interesting question, particularly because her department at Oxford has an exchange program with MIT and the Oxford students (4-5 each year) are chosen by lottery if there’s an over-subscription (i.e., not only the most academic students get to go to MIT).
I sense you are right that her familiarity with Oxbridge and the fact that her school sends a good percentage of each graduating class to Oxbridge probably make these two universities less intimidating. By contrast, it is rare for a student from her school to head for MIT - perhaps one every 5-6 years, although I don’t know how many apply each year - so there might be a greater mystique factor with MIT.
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